Intelligent Design of our very own "madrassas"

It would seem to me that the proponents of intelligent design (ID) would likely concur with the literal meaning of the title of Thomas L. Friedman’s new book, “The World Is Flat”. After all, there is the popular myth that Christians in the Middle Ages believed that the earth was flat. The even greater myth associated with that era concerns Galileo, who is believed to have committed heresy by suggesting that the earth was round? As a matter of fact, however, Galileo actually suggested much to the chagrin of the Church that the sun, and not the earth, was the center of the universe. For this sacrilegious proposition, Galileo was condemned by the Church in a 1633 trial to lifelong imprisonment. In 1992, over 350 years after Galileo’s death, the best redemption that Pope John Paul II could offer Galileo was admitting

“that errors had been made by the theological advisors in the case of Galileo. He declared the Galileo case closed, but he did not admit that the Church was wrong to convict Galileo on a charge of heresy because of his belief that the Earth rotates round the sun.”

We have had our own taste of the “religion vs. science” debate with the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, where the teaching of evolution in state-funded classrooms was deemed unlawful. In the decades since that infamous ruling, however, the United States has always been a nation on the leading edge of science and technology. Unfortunately, some educators in the country now seem determined to take actions that would put our youth at a disadvantage. In a May 17 editorial entitled “The Evolution of Creationism”, The New York Times laments that ID proponents in Kansas seek

“to change the definition of science in a way that appears to leave room for supernatural explanations of the origin and evolution of life”.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is picking up on cutting-edge scientific discoveries that encroach into the boundaries of what ID proponents call “creationism”. So we will fall behind, not only due to the flattening of our world, but also due to the flatulence of our “creative” Luddites. Maybe this limerick might help shock them back to the infallibility of science:

Conservatives from the plains of Kansas
Are creating doubts about the sciences
Evolution they say is not fully refined
So with one small step for intelligent design
They take a giant leap to our very own “madrassas”

Or maybe rapid developments in science will do the trick, anyway? In an editorial today entitled “A Surprising Leap on Cloning”, The New York Times bemoans the fact

“that leadership in ‘therapeutic cloning’ has shifted abroad while American scientists, hamstrung by political and religious opposition, make do with private or state funds in the absence of federal support”.

The Times reported yesterday that President Bush further exacerbated the problem by promptly threatening to deploy the first veto of his presidency “over the thorny issue of embryonic stem cell research”. So we have a President — although beset with serious foreign policy crises in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea and facing gargantuan domestic policy issues such as social security and budget deficits — choosing instead to expend his political capital over the Terri Schiavo case, the “nuclear option” on judicial appointments, and stem cell research! If the President and his Republican cohorts in Congress don’t get their act together real soon, these moral and social values — which they claim got them elected with improved majorities in 2004 — will surely come back to haunt them in 2006. At least that's what all the recent polls — scientific polls, I might add — are indicating?